Kazakhstan 2024 time zone update now available

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.

On December 7, 2023, the Kazakh Ministry of Trade and Integration proposed that Kazakhstan switch to a single time zone in 2024. Specifically, Kazakhstan would uniformly apply the fifth time zone (UTC+5) across its entire territory. Prior to March 1, 2024, Kazakhstan used two time zones: UTC+5 and UTC+6.

Based on the government article published on January 29, 2024, it appears that the DST time change was approved.

The impact of this change is that, as of March 1, 2024, the following turned back the local time by one hour:

• The cities of Astana, Almaty, and Shymkent.
• The regions of Abai, Akmola, Almaty, Zhambyl, Zhetisu, Karagandy, Kostanai, Pavlodar, North Kazakhstan, Turkistan, Ulytau, and East Kazakhstan. 

Microsoft is releasing the below  Windows updates in support of this decision. This change is available in the March 2024 non-security preview update, released on March 26, 2024 for the newer versions of Windows 10 and 11. All other supported Windows versions will receive the update as part of the next monthly quality update scheduled for release on April 9 , 2024. 

All Windows updates containing this fix have the following release note text: 

“This update includes changes to Kazakhstan daylight saving time (DST)"

The KB article numbers that support this change are listed below:

Visit Interim guidance for Kazakhstan time zone changes 2024 for an earlier announcement of this change.

For Microsoft's official policy on DST and time zone changes, please see Daylight saving time help and support. For information on how to update Windows to use the latest global time zone rules, see How to configure daylight saving time for Microsoft Windows operating systems.